The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the Vote (review)

The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the Vote. By James E. Campbell. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000; pp. xv + 314. $17.05 paper.

Campaigns are renowned for their idiosyncratic nature. Sandy Maisel says they show that politics is practiced more as an art than a science; Gary Jacobson catalogues a rich variety of quirky decisions to run for congressional office; and Richard Fenno regales us with descriptions of strange doings on the trail. Fun reading it is, but the subject long received little serious attention from scholars. James E. Campbell's new work helps reverse that, putting campaigns back into standard "normal science" inquiry by political scientists.

Campbell says presidential campaigns are both important and predictable. The work follows and responds to Thomas Holbrook's Do Campaigns Matter? (1996) in establishing that importance. Campbell defines the campaign differently from Holbrook and thus concludes that its direct impact on the presidential vote is considerably greater. The presidential campaign is worth about four percentage points of contribution to the national popular two-party presidential vote (table 3.4, 76) when assuming the campaign starts at Labor Day, and about five points with an earlier start at the summer party conventions. Some of this component is systematic, deriving from the two major contributors to standard forecast models for presidential vote. And some is not. That part, worth about one and one-half percentage points, is unsystematic; events take place that cannot be forecast or foreseen but that do influence the vote. But the larger component is predictable, and the majority of the book contributes to this insight.

Predictable campaigns have three predictable components: limits to campaign effects, systematic factors incorporated during the campaign itself, and the competitive effect of campaigns. The first of these components gets three entire chapters. These show that most voters cannot be converted by the campaign. Voters are party identifiers, thus becoming largely early deciders not amenable to conversion via campaign appeals. Voters have also heard nearly all the issue positioning and appeals before, and thus have developed working notions of what each candidate supports. Candidates themselves are known commodities with political histories. Thus about two-thirds or more of voters are early deciders, and "each election is to a great measure a product of past elections" (100). Sitting presidents are often part of the campaign, and they introduce yet another predictable element based on incumbency advantage. Election-year economic performance adds another predictable component to all vote forecast models. All this predictability reduces the campaign to influencing a handful of percentage points.

Systematic factors are also part of the campaign itself. The key effect is from highly competitive campaigns by both sides, which narrow the front-runners' leads from the convention weeks to November. The conventions serve "to pull partisans closer to their parties" (142). That normally benefits trailers because they usually have the more damaged and divided party to begin with. Trailers also benefit from late-deciding voters, who usually belong to the more divided party. Finally, front-runners adopt conservation strategies, whereas trailers go for broke in the fashion of losing athletic teams.

That leaves unsystematic factors, in chapter eight. This analysis is intriguing, with 33 presidential elections dating from 1868 and a "rich description" narrative locating singular events with the capacity to impose post hoc reversals of the winner and loser. But for a missing handshake, Charles Evans Hughes would win California and turn out Woodrow Wilson in 1916. Campaign debate gaffes such as the famous Ford reference to Poland's freedom from Soviet domination in 1976 fall into this group. These contrary-to-fact conditional statements (if x, then y; but if not-x, then not-y) are unforeseen quirks that happened and in hindsight were sufficient to alter political history. Campbell as ever is systematic here, too, estimating that such events altered about four to six of the 33 contests since 1868...